Side image information of other vehicles acquired by recognizing vehicle side images can enable an assisted driving system to understand another vehicle's traveling direction by analyzing the direction of the vehicle's side, and can enable the assisted driving system to analyze the relative movement between an object vehicle and another vehicle more comprehensively, thus greatly improving the traveling security of a vehicle.
Moreover, since there are similarities between the horizontal structure of the side of a vehicle and the horizontal structure of the vehicle front face and between the reflection of vehicle headlights from the side of a vehicle and other vehicle headlights in the nighttime, vehicle image recognition methods based on a vehicle's structure, profile, and headlights will frequently cause misrecognition of the position of the vehicle. Therefore, recognizing vehicle side images is helpful to reduce misrecognitions caused by a vehicle image recognition method in the above cases.
The existing recognition methods for recognizing vehicle side images mainly record side images of other vehicles located near the object vehicle through a camera placed on the side of the object vehicle. Then the wheels of another vehicle located to the side of the object vehicle are recognized based on the understanding that the recorded images of the two side wheels of another vehicle located to the side of the object vehicle should be in the same horizontal position, so that vehicles located to the side of the object vehicle are recognized.
However, we can deduce that these vehicle side recognition methods can only be used in vehicle recognition systems with a camera mounted on the side of the object vehicle, because the methods require that the two side wheels of a vehicle to be recognized are on the same horizontal line. These methods cannot provide a vehicle side image recognition function for use in front and side vehicle recognition systems.